During recent years local scholarship in the field of South Africa's foreign policy has tended to focus on the structure of state institutions and on the personalities of the decision makers. Whilst I do not wish to underplay the importance of monitoring the transformation occurring within the state apparatus , especially in relation to the militarization of the top layers of the bureaucracy, it is nevertheless important to draw away from an emphasis on the model of bureaucratic politics if one is to do full justice to an understanding of South Africa’s interactions with other social formations.